There's no business like dough business

A listener named Jed Cronfeld noticed something odd in the Atlantic Avenue–Barclays Center station in Brooklyn: three Wetzel's Pretzels locations within a minute's walk of each other. One in the mall above the station, two more inside the subway terminal itself, each about the size of a broom closet. Jed wanted to know why they were there, whether they competed with each other, and whether any of them actually turned a profit. The answer, it turns out, reveals something about how impulse products work, how franchisees think, and how a bad lease can force a business to get creative.

The logic of impulse

John Fisher, until recently the head of development for Wetzel's Pretzels, explained the company's core strategy with a mantra: "Wherever there's people, there should be pretzels." The key insight is that pretzels are an impulse product, not a destination product. Nobody wakes up thinking, "I need a pretzel today." People buy pretzels because they smell them, see them, and decide on a whim. So Wetzel's places its stores in high-traffic, high-visibility areas — malls, transit hubs, stadiums — and then adds more stores along the same route to create repeated exposure. "I'm capturing people at different places in different times within their route," Fisher explained, "or I'm even exposing them to the thought and the smell of one place